We support women writers living and working in the East of England * Shortlisted for the Women In Publishing New Venture Award 2015 & 2016, for Saboteur Best One-Off Event 2015 and Best Anthology 2014 * Our anthologies are available to buy from Unthank Books * Our prose competition closes for entries on the 15th November! £1600 in prizes, sponsored by Hosking Houses Trust and Gold Dust mentoring. Winners published in the forthcoming Words And Women compendium!

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Monday, 4 September 2017

Our prose competition launches!

Our annual prose competition launches today with two major prizes: the East of England Prize and our National Prize for Women Writers over the age of 40.

Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
(c) Rosalind Hobley

This is the fifth year our competition’s been running
and this year we’re proud to announce that we don’t have one guest judge but two! Emily Midorikawa
and Emma Claire Sweeney are the authors ofA
Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot andWoolf.
They also co-runSomethingRhymed.com, a
website that celebrates female literary friendship. They’ve written for the
likes of theGuardian, theIndependent on SundayandThe Times. Emily is a winner of
the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, Emma is author of the award-winning novelOwl
Song at Dawn, and they both teach at New York University,
London.

Emily and Emma will be
looking for compelling voices from the entries, ‘voices that combine
a sensitivity to the musicality of language with a story that holds the
reader's attention from beginning to end. Narratives that are nuanced, complex
and unusual will make us sit up and take note.’

The national award, generously sponsored by Hosking Houses Trust, offers
women over the age of 40 the opportunity to win £1,000 and up to a month-long
writing retreat at Church Cottage near Stratford-upon-Avon.

The East of England prize offers the winner £600 and a mentoring session
with Jill Dawson of Gold Dust.

Both national and regional winners will be published in The Words And Women Compendium which
will be launched on International Women’s Day, 8th March, 2018.

They will also have the opportunity to read at this event too.

All competition
entrants will be offered a special discount for Gold Dust, the high calibre
mentoring scheme for writers.

For more information on the
prizes see our dedicated blog page comp prizes and for details on how to
enter see our dedicated blog pagecomp entrydetails.

But in short: entries should
be 2,200 words or under.Fiction in any
genre, memoir, life-writing, essays and creative non-fiction on any theme are
all welcome. Extracts from longer works will not be considered. The competition
is open for entries from the 5th September and the deadline for
entries is 15th November 2017. Winners will be announced in January
2018.